It’s not always a eureka moment. It might not change the world. But it's a moment of clarity that help set your course. It's up to you to create the environment that makes it happen.
There is a sudden, surprising upsurge in the number of designers extolling the value of code. That’s not to say that designers are arbitrarily acknowledging the beauty of a well-formed operator overload in C++. No, they’re clamouring for courseware for front-end development. Designers want to be developers.
Persona development can be contradictory. We use personas to validate and stress-test user journeys, scenarios, navigation models and so on, but we often don’t stress-test the personas themselves to see if they withstand scrutiny.
It is perhaps fitting that, as we scrambled to the finish line of Playful 11, the last thing we had to do was stack the chairs in Conway Hall so that the ballroom dancing could start on time. Last time I stacked chairs to make way for dancing was at school, at a time when I thought the future was bright, shiny and full of opportunities.
When creating user experiences, you need to understand the problem you’re designing a solution for. You’d better engage the users, the customers and stakeholders. You’d better evolve those insights into concepts, journeys, information architectures and design frameworks. You’d better work with the best build and delivery partners.